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Being a hermit had - well, basically no upsides, really, except for the fact that it would’ve been way harder to hide that mermaid in his old New York apartment.
A mermaid. A honest to god fish girl with a tail that had to be at least seven feet long, which definitely did not fit in his bathtub, so he’d been awkwardly throwing buckets of water over it every fifteen minutes or so, because he didn’t know much of anything about mermaids (because they weren’t supposed to exist), but fish definitely did need water, so she probably did too, right? Keeping her head under water seemed like it would be top priority, or at least, keeping her gills under, since he doubted she breathed via her mouth, but since those gills were on her neck, that was basically same thing. So he’d stuffed her human upper half in his bathtub, and let the tail mostly hang out of it. Sue him for not having a 10 feet long bathtub in preparation for the mythological creature he’d had to rescue.
The part of his brain he tried very hard to ignore, the scientist part his parents liked so much, was running overdrive. For such a large creature to have gone unnoticed by wider human society was - not impossible, considering how much trouble they still had tracking blue whales, which were much larger, but certainly more likely if they lived in the twilight zone of the ocean or lower. Vic had never studied marine biology (hadn’t studied anything if he could get away with it, not after he’d gone to school and joined the football team and realized there was more to life than studying), so he really wasn’t in the position to analyze parts of the mermaid’s anatomy to try and guess at her habitat, but weren’t fish in the twilight zone often red, due to the lack of red light penetrating that far? That would certainly explain a lot.
The thing that got him was that red. Bright red hair, coily like his but so, so much longer, longer than any hair he’d ever seen, and when he said ‘red’, he wasn’t talking ‘ginger’. It was an unnatural, almost chemical red, like someone had opened up Microsoft Paint and colour-dropped the most saturated red they could find and then used the paint bucket tool to fill her hair with it. The scales on her tail (and the stray ones on her body) were much the same colour, only there it was intermingled with various shades of orange and yellow, making it look like fire when it moved. That was what had drawn his attention to her, when he’d seen her stranded and unconscious in the shallows of the beach.
He couldn’t imagine any fishing boats missing it if she swam by. It was counterproductive in terms of camouflage, so either she was poisonous/venomous (which, technically possible, but super weird to think about) and this was a warning display, or she lived in parts of the ocean where her colouration didn’t matter. Considering the fact that, again, mermaids were not supposed to exist and the scientific community at large had never even considered their existence, his money was on the latter.
Fifteen minutes had passed, and so he got up to throw another bucket of water over the mermaid. Water splashed around his feet as he walked, and he was so busy wondering if this amount of water would permanently ruin his floor that he didn’t notice the tail glide back until he was ready to throw the bucket over it.
“You gave me a shirt,” a voice said, amused, and Vic startled with a yell and dropped the bucket.
The mermaid has pushed herself up against the edge of the tub, and was playing with the fabric of his spare too-large sweatshirt that he’d hastily draped over the mermaid when he’d realized she was topless. It was probably stupid, since clothes would likely be useless in the ocean and it was unlikely they were part of mermaid culture, but damnit, his mom hadn’t raised him to handle a naked woman without her consent, and while in this case it had been sort of necessary, if he had the option to cover her up, he was gonna.
And so, the first thing he said to the creature of myths and legends in his bathtub was: “Humans have a thing about nakedness.”
Her lips curled into a smile, and oh, among all the fuzz about realizing at least one fairytale creature actually existed, he hadn’t noticed how absolutely drop-dead gorgeous this particular one was. Was that a standard for mermaids? Did their society have a concept of beauty? Did they have a society?
Then he was distracted by her eyes, when she finally looked up from his shirt and at him, and specifically, the fact that they were green. A solid pupil-less toxic green, and even in the stark led-light of his bathroom, he could see them glowing.
He’d never understood his parents’ endless scientific curiosity more and he resented it.
She cocked her head slightly. “There was less metal in the humans I’ve met before.”
And any excitement that had been building in his chest deflated.
Instinctively, anger rose up in him, and he prepared to snap at her, to tell her to mind her own damn business and that he couldn’t help what his dad had turned him into, but he forced it down, taking deep breaths and closing his eyes until he felt like the red haze was probably gone. When he opened them again, the mermaid was looking at him, a slight crease in her eyebrows.
“You do suppress your emotions like they do, though,” she noted, unimpressed.
He looked at the ceiling and counted to ten. “If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have anything left in this damn that house wasn’t broken.”
“Why?” she asked, then widened her eyes a little. “Oh! You are angry. Why?”
Why?
“I don’t like bein’ reminded that I’m a half-robot freak,” he said, through gritted teeth.
“Robot?” she asked, and for the first time, her pronunciation was off. It was like her lips couldn’t properly form around the word, and it knocked the anger out of him in favor of confusion. “I don’t think that word has a Tamaranean translation. Could you explain what it means?”
“Tamaranean?” he asked.
“My language,” she elaborated. “I am from the kingdom of Tamaran. It is one of the seven great ocean kingdoms.”
“There are ocean kingdoms?” he asked, like a dumbass.
“There are land kingdoms as well, aren’t there?” she replied, nonplussed.
There was so much wrong with that logic, but they didn’t have time to unpack it, so he just said, “Yeah, alright. And you live in Tamaran? Where is that?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Or, well, I do, but I don’t know how to explain it in terms that humans would understand. It is between two of the great currents.”
Which was meaningless to him, but marking your boundaries by currents did make more sense than using human borders, even if currents did shift quite a bit. Once again, there was a lot to unpack here, and a lot more he wanted to ask, but he really did have to prioritize more pressing questions.
“How do you know English?” he asked.
“I absorbed it from a different human.” She pushed herself up a little higher on the bathtub’s edge, causing water to slush all over his floor, and turned her head as if looking for something. “Actually, it shouldn’t be too long before they’ll be here. They promised to track me down if I ever got kidnapped again.”
He stood up a little straighter at that. “Kidnapped?” he asked, alarmed.
“Oh, yes,” she answered, far too casually, still straining her neck. “I escaped Gorgonian - ah, slavery from another ocean kingdom, and they did not take kindly to that. They have been hunting me ever since. My human friends were helping me avoid their patrols, until they miscalculated, and we got ambushed. I swam away, and the slavers followed me, so they should be fine, but -”
There was. A lot. There.
“There’s slavery in the ocean?” he said. “There's really no escaping that shit, huh?”
“I did escape,” the mermaid said, and then, with steel in her voice, “And I intend to keep it that way.”
“Yeah, me too, fuck.” He rubbed his hand over his face, and when he looked up again, he saw the mermaid staring at him with a curious expression.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I mean that I’m not about to let you go back to fucking slavery if I can physically help it,” he answered, crossing his arms. “And I can physically help it, because I wish all those mermaids good luck trying to crawl up to this house. The water doesn’t reach it.”
The mermaid froze, a complicated expression on her face. “Huh,” she then said, slowly. “I suppose - I suppose being on land would make me impossible to reach. But -” she chewed her lip.
“But?” he supplied.
She closed her eyes, than sank lower, back into the water. There wasn’t really too much left in the bathtub. He should probably refill it soon.
“How much do I need to give up, to stay alive?” she said, a bitter note in her voice. “How much more until there’s nothing left of me?”
That was -
Well.
“You realize you’re talking to a guy whose body is at least half metal at this point, right?” he said.
It probably wasn’t the right thing to say, because it was making the situation all about him, which was rude as all goddamn hell, but still.
But still.
What else was he supposed to say?
She opened her eyes and looked at him. It was difficult to tell, but it seemed more intense than usual.
“Why is your body half metal?” she asked, as if it had only just occurred to her that it was more than a little oddity.
Which - she knew as little about humans as he did mermaids, seemingly. It was very possible that that was exactly the case.
He expected anger to rise, as it always did when he thought about his - everything - for longer than three seconds. But it didn’t. It stayed simmering in his stomach, where it always was these days, but it didn’t fan into a fire.
Even so, the words tasted like ash in his mouth. “My dad fucked up badly, I got into an accident and my mom was killed, and then he put all this -” he knocked against his metal forearm with his equally metal fingers, which created a metallic clanging sound “- in me to save my life. Everyone says I should be grateful, but it’s kinda fucking hard to believe them when they refuse to even look at me, you know?”
“The metal’s saving your life?” the mermaid asked, confusion creeping into her tone.
He shrugged. “I can explain the details behind it if you got, oh, three days, but if you don’t, you’re just gonna have to take my word for it.”
She stared at him, and he was sure it was his imagination, but her eyes seemed to glow just a little more intensely. Then, she sagged. A small smile played around her lips.
“Then I’m glad for its existence,” she said. Then, she knocked the side of his bathtub, mimicking the way he’d knocked his forearm. “As I am glad that you saved me and put me in this strange water-holding device, even if it’s cramped and uncomfortable. Freedom - life - is a gift, regardless of what form it takes.”
Of all the things he’d expected from a mermaid in his bathtub, which he hadn’t expected to begin with, probably the last thing was for her to rip his heart of his chest and then carefully put it back in, like it was a treasure to be buried. Tears welled up in his eyes, for the first time in god-knows-how-long, and he reached up to wipe them before they could spill.
Then a loud BANG came from the living room, accompanied by the sound of wood and glass breaking, so cartoonish he half-expected a cat to screech, and then a woman’s voice shouted “If you hurt Koriand’r, you’ll be sorry!”
Vic pressed his fingers against his forehead. “You’re Koriand’r, I’m assuming?” he asked the mermaid.
The mermaid had sat up against the edge again and was waving enthusiastically, even though the door to the bathroom was closed and nobody but Vic could see her. “Donna!” she yelled. “I’m here! This man’s a friend!”
She paused mid-wave and looked at him. “What is your name?”
The door to the bathroom banged open, and Vic almost didn’t want to turn around, but it wasn’t like he really had much choice, so.
In the doorway stood two people, with white skin and black hair, one a woman and one a man. More importantly, the woman was holding a glowing gold lasso.
A golden lasso. That glowed.
“This is going to be my life now, isn’t it?” he said out loud, earning a bewildered look from the two problems in the doorway, and a slight lowering of the presumably-magic golden lasso.
“What?” the man asked, confused.
“Nothing,” Vic said, allowing himself to rub his forehead one more time, before standing straight, and extending a hand. “My name’s Victor Stone and I found a mermaid in the shallows and put her in my bathtub, as I always do on Tuesday. Could we get some lunch while you explain to me what the hell is going on?”
They did get some lunch, and Dick and Donna were far better at explaining what had happened than Koriand’r had been, and also apparently the mermaid in his bathtub was a princess.
If he didn’t at least end up in a ballad or two after this, he was going on strike.